When the board went up with four minutes on it at the end of Atlético Madrid’s visit to Montilivi, the same thought crossed pretty much everyone’s mind: oh come on, is that all?

It was way after 11pm on a cold, misty Wednesday night in January, the first time fans had ventured out since Christmas, but they would have carried on until the morning if they could have. Once in a while a game comes along you wish would never end – once in a while or every other week if you’re Girona, purveyors of partidazos, serving up a 5-3, a 5-2, and three 4-2s – and this was it. A bit special, even for them.

In the final game of the first half of the season, week 19 in La Liga, Girona had laid into Atlético and then Atlético had laid back into them. There had been 33 shots, 20 on target, and six goals, the whole thing wonderfully wild. The only thing it didn’t have was a winner, and now there wasn’t going to be time for one.

Not a second wasted sadly meant not many seconds added – there’s a grim irony to it being the games when you would gladly gouge out your eyeballs that go on and on and the ones that are fun that finish first. If there was a kind of justice in it finishing 3-3, something shared, there was something missing too, the kind of ending the evening deserved.

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Or so they thought. Instead, the game that got its first goal 101 seconds after the stadium clock started, got its last 40 seconds after the stadium clock stopped. Iván Martín, the midfielder considered underrated by his Girona teammates, went all Ronaldinho and everyone in the place went off their heads. “He doesn’t even know what he did,” teammate Aleix García said.

What he had done was escape one Atlético Madrid player and then, surrounded by three more of them just inside the area, nowhere left to go, no room to lift his foot let alone let fly, toe-poke the ball past Jan Oblak and into the top corner. It was, Diego Simeone said despite being defeated at the death, “a great winning goal for a great game”. As 4-3 winners, Girona had only gone and done it again, just even better this time.

Wednesday was that kind of night, a ridiculous game where both goalkeepers were brilliant but still let in seven between them. A night Álvaro Morata scored the first hat-trick of his La Liga career, could have scored two of them, claimed the Player of the Match award with 72% of the vote and still lost.

Because it was also the night when Artem Dovbyk, Girona’s top scorer, didn’t score and Cristhian Stuani, their second-top scorer, didn’t either. Instead, four of their teammates did. When Rodrigo De Paul, who made three goals, called Atlético’s performance “brutal” and Axel Witsel described it as “spectacular”, and when they were both right, but they were still beaten. And yet where you still couldn’t really say their opponents were lucky.

There is nothing lucky about Girona; risky, sure, but so much the better for it and deliberate too. For the first 20 minutes, Michel Sánchez’s side took Atlético apart the way they have so many others. Valery Fernández put them 1-0 up in the second minute with a gorgeous curled finish. Although Morata equalised on 14, Girona were as relentless as Atlético were accident-prone: 3-1 up in the 39th minute, with goals from Sávio and Daley Blind, it could have been more, the attempts on goal racking up like a Hot Shots body count.

With De Paul superb, Morata made it 3-2 with a neatly taken goal on 43.33 and then, he thought, 3-3 on 45.07. That one was ruled out for offside, but Morata did equalise on 53.11. It had been coming: it would be no exaggeration to say that was Atlético’s seventh chance in seven second-half minutes. Girona could not get out, Atlético smothering them, going man to man all round Montilivi.

“In my humble opinion, I think we were the better team in the second half,” said De Paul. “I always thought we would win, that we would get the fourth. You miss a chance and then a minute later you get another one, and another, and another, and another …”

Even Girona coach Míchel admitted: “In the second half you could see that Atlético were going to turn it around.”

They didn’t. As time slipped away and it looked like no one was going to win this, somehow Martín did. It’s hard to think of a more popular player – “you can con the people and the media but not your teammates, and the dressing room is totally won over by him,” Míchel said – and it’s not easy to think of a more significant moment either.

Sure, Antonio Rüdiger’s header against Mallorca a couple of hours earlier had ensured Real Madrid would be Spain’s winter champions, the trophy-less “title” handed to the team top of the table at the halfway stage when everyone has played everyone else, but Martín’s goal ensured that Girona remain level with them.

It still doesn’t feel real somehow: Girona, joint top after 19 games, the psychological watershed. The team whose objective was survival have 48 points, one fewer than they got in the whole of last season. They’re on course for 96, are seven ahead of Barcelona, who needed a late penalty to defeat Las Palmas, and 10 above Atlético. They have never been in Europe, but they will be: they are 20 clear of the final European place.

“It’s a big cushion,” García said as Girona’s players celebrated in the dressing room, Blind standing on the bench behind him, mobile phone in hand – maybe the reception is better up there – while teammates leapt about and Yan Couto threw towels at him. “This is a historic night,” Míchel said.

“It’s a great season: it’s not easy to be up there: being 10 points ahead of Atlético is a dream, we would never have imagined that at the start,” Couto said, although he also insisted they can’t win the league. “What we can do is keep going and see where it takes us.”

Getafe 0–2 Rayo, Real Sociedad 1–1 Alavés, Valencia 3–1 Villarreal, Granada 2–0 Cádiz, Real Madrid 1–0 Mallorca, Celta 2–1 Betis, Girona 4–3 Atlético, Osasuna 1–0 Almería, Sevilla 0–2 Athletic, Las Palmas 1–2 Barcelona

And that’s the thing: Madrid remain formidable opponents and clear favourites, but this is too far in to be a fluke soon forgotten and as they celebrated on Wednesday it really didn’t feel that ridiculous to imagine them being taken all the way. Set up as the game that would decide if these two teams could compete for the title, there was by the end of it, a clear conclusion: Girona can

This was the kind of win titles are made of, the luck of the champions but the quality of them too: brilliant but by the skin of their teeth, a result clinched in the last minute, against a team that good and playing that well, which makes you think: hang on, this is real. Which, maybe even makes them think so.

Girona are not giving up, that is for sure. Every time you think the fall is coming, every time you think they can’t keep winning they win. This time more than any other time. As the board went up, it was gone, Madrid slipping away. This time it was enough to have avoided defeat and they still won, goal difference away from being winter champions. Just when you think they can’t keep doing it, they go and do it again. And like this.

“To sum it up: it’s football,” De Paul said. “And that’s why it’s the loveliest game on earth.”

Talking points

• Antonio Rüdiger’s Real Madrid teammates laid into him, finally taking revenge. The man who celebrates their goals by punching them – like, properly punching them – had just scored one of his own. And it was huge too, so they gave some back. Mallorca had impressed at the Santiago Bernabéu, hitting the bar and the post – on the former, the ball was very close to going over the line – and Madrid had not created much. But with 15 minutes left, Rüdiger headed in Luka Modric’s corner. It was the second time in two games that a header from a corner had secured a 1-0 victory, after Lucas Vázquez had scored in the 92nd minute at Alavés just before Christmas, and it secured Madrid’s place as “winter champions”. “I have done a lot of punching the last few months and I knew it was my turn,” the German said, “but don’t worry: when Vinícius, Brahim Díaz or [Jude] Bellingham scored next time, I’ll get them back.” Does it annoy you that people think you’re mad, he was asked. “No, because I am a bit mad,” he said.

• “The pressure’s on,” Ilkay Gündoğan admitted. His 94th minute penalty clinched a 2-1 win for Barcelona at Las Palmas. Which might sound big anyway, but it was bigger even than that. Totally outplayed in a dreadful first half in which they did not manage a single shot, Barcelona got a second-half equaliser when Robert Lewandowski made his most telling contribution – getting a ball booted in his face which fell to Ferran Torres to score – and were then handed a late chance to to win it when Gündoğan was pushed over. Defeat would have left them 10 points behind Madrid and Girona. It would also have seen them slip to fifth, behind Athletic Club – and missing out on the Champions League would be catastrophic for them. Even a draw wouldn’t have been much good. It would have hurt too, against the team led by Xavi García Pimienta, the man Joan Laporta pushed out of Barcelona when some saw him as a future coach.

Xavi, the man Laporta did eventually turn to, quite pointedly noted afterwards: “It didn’t happen, so why focus on a supposition?” He called going on about what might have happened “absurd” and complained that the media is “always negative”. Thing is, it’s hard to see how they can be positive when Barcelona had been a penalty away from another dreadful result, when the first half was as bad as the first 45 minutes in their last game against Almería, which he called “unacceptable”, laying into his players at half time and afterwards in the press conference, and when this just keeps happening. Sure, they turn a lot of them around but that’s 10 times now that they have conceded the first goal. If games lasted just 45 minutes, Barcelona would be 14th. And it’s not just about the points, it’s about the play – and based on the play, the inescapable conclusion is that, no, Barcelona can’t win the league. Frankly, you wouldn’t count on them holding on to fourth.

• “With a different club and a different context, I’d already be gone,” Cádiz manager Sergio admitted after they were beaten by Granada – who had only won once all season and that was back in August. “I just hope that the president has that little bit of patience because I am convinced that we are going to turn this around,” he said, but he’s just about the only one. In the relegation zone at the half way stage, Cádiz have not won in four months. And this performance was, Sergio admitted, “unacceptable”.

• Williot Swedburg this season: no starts, seven sub appearances, 100 minutes, two goals: in the 87th and 96th minutes delivering two of Celta de Vigo’s three wins all season. This time, he helped pull them from the relegation zone. Things are looking up for Rafa Benítez’s side.

• “Shut up and show some respect!” All is not well in Seville. In fact, all is really, really, really bad.